Sebokeng Journal; Bullied by Its Own Young, the Township Festers

By BILL KELLER,

Published: July 31, 1992

SEBOKENG, South Africa, July 29—
Dr. Josiah Musundwa practices family medicine in a sector of this black township popularly known as Beirut. These days he finds the name alarmingly apt.

It is not just the teen-age revolutionary poseurs who rule the neighborhoods, hijacking and burning cars, digging anti-tank trenches, turning away ambulances and terrorizing local residents.

It is not just the mountain of uncollected garbage that festers outside his waiting room, or the broken sewer pipes that spew rivers of human filth into the streets because the authorities refuse to send in repair crews.

Worse than that, the doctor said, is the sense, new in these last few months, that this black township and others in the industrial heartland called the Vaal Triangle, are deteriorating into a state near anarchy. 'Are We Mad?'

"It's almost a free-for-all now," the doctor mused, between examinations of the few patients still willing to brave the streets. "You don't know whether it's political or the thugs or whatever. It almost has created an element of insanity where you find all the basic structures in the community are collapsing.

"You even ask yourself, are we mad to be surviving in an area like this one?"

This morning township residents stared mutely at a cavalcade of yellow armored transports, part of a contingent of 5,000 policemen and soldiers ordered into Sebokeng and 13 other black townships in what the authorities called a "peace offensive" aimed at quelling violence and restoring basic services.

The settlement seemed to be of two minds about the security forces: the majority who regard them with suspicion, and assume their arrival heralds fresh conflict, and the rest who regard them with secret, guarded relief, but know the violence will resume as soon as they leave.

In an alternative approach to the deterioration of order here, white authorities and black civic leaders agreed this week to send a joint task force of local residents and "low-profile" police with sanitation workers in an effort to repair sewers before a threatened outbreak of cholera.

Sanitation workers say workmen have been stoned and vehicles burned in recent months. Revolt of the Teen-Agers

But some participants questioned whether the black leaders had any better hope of stabilizing the township disorder than the police.

This time the chaos, which residents and officials say is the worst to hit the Vaal Triangle since 1984, is not the perennial eruption of black protest, or the more recent rivalry among black political factions. It is, many believe, a kind of wild mutiny of a lost generation raised to adolescence without prospects or discipline.

"There is a serious concern, even if one reached an agreement with the parents, whether the kids will listen to them," said S. Nigel Mandy, an urban planner retained by the Transvaal Provincial Administration, which subsidizes services to black townships. "We're talking today about a crisis of ungovernability."

Black political leaders here insist that white authorities have exaggerated the disorder to excuse their own neglect of black neighborhoods and to justify a heavier police presence.

The townships of the Vaal Triangle have a long history of unrest. In 1984 residents of Sebokeng, which has a population of about 350,000, and three other townships began a boycott of rent and utility payments that lasted seven years. Many of the garbage heaps date back to this strike.

Then last year fighting broke out here between African National Congress backers and those of the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party.

Residents say things took a wrenching turn for the worse last month, after a massacre in nearby Boipatong township. Local youths took to the streets in a frenzied defense that soon degenerated into opportunistic violence.

Leaders of the Sebokeng branch of the African National Congress insist the street barricades and teen-age "defense units" represent not anarchy but a precaution against assassins from rival groups and the police.

Local residents, however, are not so sure. They refer to their self-appointed defenders as "com-tsotsi," a wry combination of "comrade," the township badge of militancy, and "tsotsi," the township slang for thug.

"It's really losing the political direction," said Alec Shabalala, chairman of the African National Congress in the Vaal Triangle region. "After Boipatong, it has just spilled over. Now you have people who exploit the situation to do their personal things. You have these youths who take a car, drive around, and when the fuel is finished they burn it." The Bills Aren't Paid

A less obvious symptom of the anarchy, the local authorities say, is that people have again stopped paying their utility bills; only one in five township households now pays for electricity, water and sewers, Mr. Mandy said, although the formal boycott ended more than a year ago.

Some Sebokeng residents said this wildcat boycott was forced on them by the "com-tsotsis," who went house to house threatening those who paid their utility bills.

In the long term, the Government and black leaders agree that the only hope for making such townships liveable is to merge them with white municipalities, which have the tax base to underwrite better services.

But the white cities want nothing to do with black settlements that refuse to pay their taxes, not to mention burning the city's repair trucks.

"Nobody expected the process to be easy," said Mr. Mandy, who has been trying to negotiate mergers of white and black areas. "But perhaps we didn't expect it to be quite so self-destructive."

Photo: A street in the township of Sebokeng, South Africa, is lined with uncollected garbage and puddles of human filth that leaks from broken sewer pipes. The township is deteriorating into a state near anarchy. (Tim Zielenbach for The New York Times) Map of South Africa showing location of Sebokeng.